


Time Is Fluid Here

by CassieWritesDestiel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Broken Dean Winchester, Canon Related, Dean Winchester Has Nightmares, Dean Winchester in Hell, Demon Dean Winchester, Gen, Hell, Hell Trauma, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Torture, Inspired by "Other People" by Neil Gaiman, Nightmares, Non-Demon Dean Winchester, Not Beta Read, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 13:32:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16661937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CassieWritesDestiel/pseuds/CassieWritesDestiel
Summary: Dean awakes in hell after the hellhound reaped him. It isn't as he expected, but then again, it is.





	Time Is Fluid Here

**Author's Note:**

> This was heavily inspired by Neil Gaiman's short story "Other People" (Some of the lines, including the first sentence, are directly taken from the short story.)
> 
> Warning: Possible Selfharm Triggers

“Time is fluid here,” said the demon. 

Dean stared at the smoke in front of him, wavering around, darker than the darkness surrounding them. He didn’t know where he was and how he got here, what was happening? Frantically, with the waves of panic rolling down over the shores of his soul and flooding it, he looked around, but in the darkness, nothing was to be found. It was just him and the demon in its pure form. Dean closed his eyes and tried to remember, and yes, now he did, he remembered the deal and the hellhound and Sam…  _ Sammy… _ screaming his name, as if it would help anything. He was in hell, and quite rightfully too. 

“What happens now?” Dean asked, already knowing the answer, puzzled why they hadn’t already started. 

“Now,” the demon said, “You will be tortured.” There was only the slightest hint of joy in the smoke’s voice as it showed Dean its working tools: knives, some mean, sharp and tiny, some big and ragged; needles in all sizes; a cat o’ nine tails, and several other torture devices Dean couldn’t name, some of which he hadn’t ever seen in his life. Dean wasn’t scared though, he had known this was coming and considered himself prepared. 

“Then let’s get it over with,” he said and the demon chuckled. Moments later, screams filled the room. Dean had been wrong. He hadn’t been prepared. And as a brief memory flashed before his eyes and the pain of being hung up by hooks stabbed into him, he realized this wasn’t his first round. 

At the end of every day, the demon asked the same question, stoic as ever, non-caring yet Dean couldn’t shake that there was something mischievous about it. It wasn’t a real question either, it was more of an offer. When at the end of the session his whole body hurt and his throat was hoarse from screaming, when he was so exhausted his eyes barely kept open but he knew he couldn’t sleep in the face of the enemy, then the demon came with its offer. “You can escape all this pain,” it said, “the only thing you’ll have to do is become one of us. Greet the newcomers with pain.” 

And every day (Dean considered these the days because at night came the nightmares and so he at least was able to keep some sense of time.) Dean answered with the same simple word: “No.” 

The demon then shook its equivalent of a head (in its smoke form it was difficult to tell) and then left him alone. “One day you will,” it always mumbled as it walked out the door. 

That’s when the real horror started. The physical pain that seemed so all-consuming during the day now became only a faint memory, something he wished he could go back to now because it seemed like the easier times. When they showed him a mirror image of himself, alongside with all the times he let Sam down, let his father down, every little mistake he ever made, he wished a knife would cut into him. It was easier than facing himself and everything he’s done wrong. It was easier to hold himself together and keep the walls around his heart steady when the pain was cutting into flesh and not directly into his soul. 

“You’re dead now and this is what you’re gonna become!” A demon with his face told him, staring at him blankly yet full of anger at him, and Dean backed away as he recognized the anger from his father’s eyes and he was just a little kid again, he backed away until he met the hard concrete of a wall behind him and couldn’t escape anymore. 

Sometimes, the demon’s face aged up and showed a smug smile on the face of a future Dean. He seemed to be talking to someone, Dean guessed it was Sammy, the little brother he missed so dearly. The little brother who this pain was all for and Dean took it gratefully if it meant Sam would live. When he remembered this, he was strong and wouldn’t break. As he heard the older Demon!Dean talk however, his heart sank again. 

“Oh, it’s the real me alright, the new real me, the me that sees things for  what they really are,” he said and Dean’s worst fear came true: what if he was meant to be a demon, what if he really was this evil deep down and all the good he tried to do was just masquerade? “Winchesters. Do-gooders fighting the natural order,” he continued, “Let me tell you something. Guys like me, we are the natural order. It’s the way it was set up.” Dean cried out as he realized that maybe, everything he ever fought for was wrong and for nothing. However hard he battled the monsters and everything living in the shadows of the night, it would never be enough. There would always be new monsters, new demons, and new victims he couldn’t save. 

“No,” he whispered, but there was nothing left to reassure him. 

“You act like I want to be cured,” Demon!Dean’s new words cut through the silence, meant for no one in particular, not that Dean could fathom the other half of the conversation. “Personally, I like the disease,” he stated and Dean felt how his inside grew colder and darker with this admission. There always had been one twisted part of him that would gratefully accept the offer of torturing people himself, that wasn’t as scared at the vision of him becoming a demon because maybe that’s what he already was deep within. 

After 30 years of daily pain and nightly horror, Dean broke enough to take the demon’s offer. He felt defeated as they led him into another room, towards another soul unfortunate enough to land in hell. They gave him a knife. But only as the first screams of his victim sounded through the silence was it that Dean fully broke. 

From then on, it was as if he had two halves: one dark and twisted like a demon, enjoying the pain he brought to others and selfishly happy to not be the one on the torture bench anymore, that the tables had turned; the other drowning in the black that grew in Dean’s soul, screaming and shouting at him with every cut he made into the flesh of another person. Some might say it was his good side he let slide here, the one that couldn’t live with torturing other people for the simple reason of escaping the pain himself, the one that was tortured himself by watching his hands doing this. He couldn’t live with himself, so he did what he always did: he denied and shoved this side away in order to survive. 

After 40 years in hell, his soul had grown dark and damaged, almost unrecognizable to Dean’s own eyes. But suddenly, he was enveloped in a bright white light chasing the shadows away and he fell into its comfort. When he opened his eyes again, he was six feet under. 

He was one of the living again, walking the earth with once dead bones. The memories he made during four months in the grave now belonged to the nightmares that came when he closed his eyes at night. He remembered the words with which the demon greeted him in hell. 

“Time is fluid here,” the demon had said. After 40 years in hell and 4 months in earth time he thought he knew what the demon had meant. But only years later Dean realized the true extent of those words. 

 


End file.
